TURKISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. The Turkish is one of the Turanian (q.v.) idioms, and is chiefly divided into eastern and western Turkish. The former is mainly represented by the Uigur (damatai), an idiom but recently recognized not only to belong, to the Turkic stock, but to be its most ancient representative. Its forms are fuller and more pure, albeit, to a certain extent, harder and rougher. Its alphabet is formed from the Zabian, out of which have sprung also the Mongol and Mantshu. Besides this, the Kiptchak, spoken in Kasen and Astrakhan, forms a principal branch of the eastern Turkish, for which, hoWever, but little has hitherto been done from a philological point of view.
Of infinitely higher importance, however, is the western Turkish, or of the Osmanlis. which, through the conquests of that race, has spread far and wide over the whole of western Asia, the Levant, and parts of Europe. The Osman or western Turk ish (emphatically Turkish) is more melodious and soft than the former, and so much mixed with foreign elements, chiefly Arabic and-Persian, that, were it not for its gram mar, which is purely Tartarian, it could hardly be called an original language. but rattpr a conglomeration of the three respective idioms. Besides, it has also received a large increase of words from other Asiatic and European languages, e.g., the Chinese, Greek, and Italian. It is one of the most widely spoken idioms; not only western Asia, but even the e. of Europe, use this tongue to a greztt extent for commercial and political transactions. The characters iu which it is now written are no longer the original Uigur letters, but the Arabic, the 2S characters of which have been increased by the four additional Persian characters—produced by further diacritical points, and a new one of their own, amounting iu all to 33, which are written from right to left, as is the case in all (save one) Semitic languages. But this alphabet is not web suited to a language com posed, like this, of elements belonging to the three great families of speech. viz. Semitic,
Indo-European, and Turanic. Neither the vowels nor the consonants are adequately represented in all cases. Occasionally, however, it is also written in Armenian char acters, which renders its sounds much more faithfully. There is no definite article or gender. The plural is indicated by a final far or ler, and the cases are formed by the addition of nog, ek, i, den, and is for gen., dat., aeons., abl., and instrumental respect ively; which are. in plural, affixed to the ler or fur. The adjective has no flexion. but is placed unchanged after the noun. Diminutives are formed. somewhat like in Italian, by suffixes. The comparative and superlative arc formed by circumlocution. The per sonal pronouns are without gender, and their declension is like that of the nouns. The possessive pronouns are made by suffixes. The Turkish verb is of a very complex nature, There are seven genera (active, passive, negative, impossible, causal, recipro cal, reflexive), all of which are formed by certain monosyllables aVixed or prefixed. The root of the verb is the second person singular imperative, to which the infinitive iffix mak Or iiiek is joined. The moods and tenses are formed chiefly by the addition of Jut: respective forms of the auxiliary verb olmak, to be. Apart from this, there are particles to express the optative, conjunctive, etc. Conjunctions are either formed by gerundives or possessive forms, or they are borrowed from Persian and Arabic. Adverbs are formed by certain suffixes. The Turkish construction is most peculiar; the genitive always precedes the nominative, and the verb always stands at the end. All this gives the Turkish style a peculiarly artificial and inverted appearance, old often a sentence cannot be hi the least comprehended until it is quite finished. Oriental flourishes, and allegorical figures of speech, with which Turkish is very lavish, lo not tend to facititate the study of the language.